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The Philippines is an
archipelago of 7,107 islands in the South China Sea situated between
Taiwan to the north and Borneo to the south. Just 2,000 of its islands
are inhabited and only 500 are larger than a kilometre square. The
islands of Luzon, Mindanao, Palawan, Panay, Mindoro, Samar, Negros,
Leyte and Cebu make up 90% of the nation's land area.
In the cycle of ice ages,
glaciers store a significant portion of the earth's water in the form of
ice causing a corresponding drop in the world's ocean levels. During
periods of glaciation, the Philippine archipelago has been joined to the
continental land mass of Asia. Evidence of human occupation in the
Philippines dates to as far back as 30,000 years ago.
At the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago,
the land connections to south-east Asia flooded and created the
Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. Since then, the islands have
been settled by successive migrations of people moving through the
archipelago in boats, principally from the Malay peninsula and Indonesia
but also from the coasts of Indo-China and, to a lesser extent, from
China and Taiwan as well.
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Later migrations tended to
bring with them a more sophisticated technology and social organization,
assimilating or displacing further inland the earlier arrivals. Today
the Philippines is made up of some sixty cultural groups speaking eighty
or more languages and local dialects. The five largest
cultural-linguistic groups, Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon and
Bicolano, account for about three-quarters of the population.
The last phase of
migration before the arrival of the Spanish was of Muslim traders from
Indonesia, politically organized in territorial states under the
authority of sultans and rajas. The Muslims had firearms and by the
1500s, they had penetrated and converted the Sulu archipelago and
Mindanao and established a colony at Manila. The Spanish, who had only
recently expelled their own Muslim population from Spain, put an end to
further Muslim expansion in the Philippines.
It is interesting to speculate how differently the
history of the Philippines might have unfolded had the Spanish not
arrived when they did.
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